Google and HHMI map complete male fruit fly brain

NIST Study Maps How Toxic Adulterants in Fentanyl Vary Across US

NIST researchers analyzed fentanyl samples nationwide and found that the toxic substances mixed into the drug vary by region and shift over time. The study aims to help first responders and law enforcement identify dangerous adulterants in local supplies, which the agency says can help save lives.

Apple Introduces Normalizing Trajectory Models for Few-Step Generation

Apple researchers introduced Normalizing Trajectory Models (NTM), which model each reverse diffusion step as an expressive conditional normalizing flow with exact likelihood training. NTM combines shallow invertible blocks per step with a deep parallel architecture, addressing few-step generation without sacrificing the likelihood framework that distillation, consistency training, or adversarial methods discard.

NVIDIA teaches robots to assemble GB300 tester trays

NVIDIA describes how it taught robots to assemble tester trays for its Grace Blackwell GB300 superchip, which powers AI training and inference. The work required skilled physical labor in factories worldwide. NVIDIA says the project offered lessons in robot learning, mechanical intelligence, and traditional engineering.

Google launches Playground experimental gaming platform

Google introduced Playground, a new experimental gaming platform that lets users create, play, and share custom games. The announcement appeared on Google's official blog. No further details about the platform's features, availability, or underlying technology were provided in the source.

Ai2's Bolmo byte-level language model technique published in Nature

Ai2 announced that the technique behind Bolmo, its fully open byte-level language models, has been published in Nature. New checkpoints show the approach generalizes beyond the Olmo model family to other model families, according to the Allen Institute for AI.